Re: The speech that Barnes should have given

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Perhaps the issue is not whether a particular "party" should encompass all
the
"Marxists" but rather how the various parties adhering to the general
Marxist
perspective can and should work together around specific agreed objectives.
In
other words, perhaps we should rethink the (post-Leninist) concept of the
single
"correct" revolutionary party. Or, more accurately, rethink how our chosen
"vanguard party" interrelates with other political forces and movements in a
constant dialectic of support, opposition, discussion and mutual
education....<<

I think Richard Fidler isn't getting to the real heart of this whole party
question, which is not the relationship of different ideological currents to
each other, but the relationship of the communist movement or a communist
political movement to the class.

The idea of building the nucleus of the future group(s) that will lead a
socialist revolution is, I think, wrong. It can't be "built"; it must
develop out of the actual class movement. Lenin's political trajectory
wasn't to build the Bolshevik party or faction, but to win the actual party
that the Russian workers had created, the RSDLP to consistent revolutionary
Marxist positions.

And as far as I can tell he did not have the kind of organizational concepts
we today associate with a Leninist party.

How narrowly/broadly, clearly/vaguely a party/group/movement defines itself
ideologically and politically is a question we can discuss ONLY because
we've separated the "building" of the party from the development of the
working class into a "class for itself." Really, all those sorts of issues
will be determined by the state of development of the movement, not be some
preconceived norm. The groups Marx, Engels and Lenin all joined or
associated themselves with were groups that had emerged from the actual
historical movement. Thus when Engels says (in 1847) that Communism isn't a
doctrine but a movement he means that quite literally, he's not referring to
some abstract Hegelian construct but to actual people and circles and groups
he and Marx had relations with. This is very clear if you read the Heinzen
polemic in 1847 together with his History of the Communist League written
almost 40 years later.

Moreover, it is very clear from what M&E did that they viewed each
group/organization as a step in the development of the workers movement, not
as its final, definitive form. There was nothing "sacred" for them about any
group.

The CL would have inevitably turned into a sect if M&E had tried to keep it
going from London. It was cut off from the workers movement not so much by
the repression but by the capitalist boom of those times. The Cologne
Communist Trial more than anything confirmed its isolation. So they
dissolved it.

The International was a great group, but after the Commune they got rid of
it, it had outlived its usefulness and they needed to clear the stage for
the emergence of working class parties.

It is striking that the two organizations in which Marx and/or Engels played
leading organizational roles were both dissolved *at their initiative*
within a few years (technically, the International wasn't dissolved but
rather the central authority transferred to the U.S., but that was
practically the same thing).

The Trotskyist movement also emerged from an actual historical movement, and
the political and ideological fight waged against Stalinism in the 30s was
extremely important. The tight-knit, programmatically based propaganda
league was the right kind of instrument for that fight, just as the earlier
Communist League had been the right instrument in its day.

But that does not mean it is the right instrument or the preferred or the
default form through which Marxists should organize themselves. In the
United States, a broad, militant socialist party could and should have been
organized out of the radicalization of the 1960s and early 70s. Those social
movements could and should have had an independent political expression also
in the electoral arena. With its schema about what constitutes a "workers
party" (social democratic and Stalinist betrayers are okay, a green party or
a peace and freedom party -- no way!) and its utterly false and ridiculously
unMarxist "explanation" that the "question of power" is posed in bourgeois
electoral farces and therefore one must give a Simon-pure "class answer,"
the SWP (with lots of help from lots of other "vanguard parties") blocked
the development of such groups, and when it had the chance to try to develop
in the direction of itself becoming such a party, in the mid-70s, it turned
its back on it and marched off to the factories instead.

If the SWP had actually followed through on the best aspects of its 1975
prospects for socialism resolution of quite simply just trying to be part of
working class communities and organizations in motion against whatever
aspect of capitalist exploitation and oppression, I think it would have had
a very good chance of becoming such a party. It almost certainly would have
been the dominant force in the solidarity and anti-intervention movements,
and recruited a whole new generation of young people that instead the party
missed.

The "good" side of the historic SWP came not just from its being more
orthodox Marxists, so to speak, but that, even as a propaganda league, it
was partly an outgrowth of the radicalizations and workers movement of the
30s and 40s. That, not where you worked, was the political valid core of
Cannon's "proletarian orientation." In the 1965 organizational resolution
(and perhaps earlier) the part about integration into the workers movement
was changed to all spheres of the mass movement or something like that. To
the significant degree the SWP actually did this despite what I now view as
a pretty sectarian "style of work" it grew tremendously and became
transformed enough so by the mid-70's it could have made a bid --if it had
been audacious enough-- to become the dominant force on the left.

I say "audacious enough" because what would have been required is abandoning
a lot of the things that we identified with Leninism and Trotskyism, so that
regular working people who were active around one or another issue, agreed
with the party's program, etc., would and could become members, even though
they, unlike most of us, had a life.

It would ALSO have meant abandoning the practice of "fractional
interventions" in many or most cases. If two party members disagreed at some
anti-apartheid coalition meeting on the best date for a demonstration, so be
it. The SWP's practice of basically deciding everything beforehand and
presenting the independents with a fait accompli when there was absolutely
no reason to do it created no small amount of ill will and distrust towards
the party. Sure, if there was some big important fight, caucus beforehand,
decide what you're going to do and impose caucus discipline in the specific
event. But be the kind of communists the manifesto described who "do not set
up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the
proletarian movement." The SWP members ALWAYS functioned in a faction fight
formation in the mass movement, despite Marx and Engels's injunction that
"The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class
parties." While it is true that the SWP did not have an overall sectarian
line in movements like the one against the Vietnam War, we did very much
have a sectarian way of participating which made really broad coalitions
that had more than letterhead participation next to impossible. The
slightest nuance from some "independent" or --heaven forbid-- an "opponent"
and the "big red machine" would roll right over them.

Dick Fidler expresses quite a bit of worry about whether differences in such
a broad party would have been containable. But the truth is on basic
immediate programmatic issues, like abortion, affirmative action, community
control of schools, opposition to la migra, and so on, there tended to be
fairly broad agreement among most activists. It is also true, as he points
out, a broader party would have been much harder to turn on a dime, so to
speak. The membership would mostly have to be convinced, inspired and led
politically, not managed or organized to carry out campaigns.
The question is, do you want a group of a couple of thousand people that
march in perfect military formation and act in perfect unison, or are you
willing to settle for a force of 5,000 or 10,000 partisans and irregulars
who may not be much on the parade ground, but on the other hand every one
knows what to do in a brawl.

This gets back to the relationship between the party and the class, and the
nature of the class struggle and social movements. The class struggle is NOT
formal battles in formation, it is guerrilla war. The SWP suffered from
being over-organized and over-centralized and from having to have a position
on everything.

I can remember being repeatedly asked by various comrades questions in the
form of "What do we think about" such and such a thing. Implicit in the way
the question was formulated was that all the thinking for the "we" was done
by a select group, the "leaders" and the members were trained and inculcated
in a spirit of passively absorbing the truths revealed by the leadership.
Such an organization can never lead a real mass upsurge or a revolution, for
in such a situation every experienced militant will suddenly find himself
commander of a squad or a column of workers who until the day before seemed
totally passive. If "we" have to wait for a phone call from New York or log
on to the SWP leadership's private Internet site for instructions, the other
workers aren't going to wait, if "we" are unwilling or unable to lead
another worker who is willing will step up and do it for you.

While I was in the SWP any amount of nonsense was said about insurrections
and stuff to justify this ultracentralist mode of functioning. But the truth
is real popular risings happen when they happen. Who led the February
revolution in 1917? Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution says it
was the revolutionary workers who had learned politics in the school of
Bolshevism. But those workers were totally outside party control, most did
not even belong to the very reduced underground party structures that then
existed. What was important wasn't the (alleged) centralism and discipline
and so on of the Leninist organization, but rather the success of
Bolshevism, of Leninism as a political movement, as an ideological current,
not as a structured party. And that success was due to the fact that for the
longest time, until the war made it POLITICALLY necessary, the Bolsheviks
did not set themselves up as a separate party opposed to other working class
parties, but instead functioned in and as part of the party of the Russian
workers, the RSDLP. Again, the KEY thing to note is the relationship of the
party or political movement to the class.

In his History of the Communist League, Engels gives some very instructive
examples of how the League functioned. He doesn't say anything about hawking
papers at plant gates. Instead he relates how the League set up workers
associations --social and mutual aid type clubs-- to create for itself an
arena in which to do political work. In fact, Marx and Engels (and some of
their friends) did have a paper but it was not an organ of the League. They
also had something else, the 1846 equivalent of an email list. Engels
describes how, before joining, they tried to influence the thinking of the
group that would become the Communist League:

"... [W]e influenced the theoretical views of the most important members of
the League by word of mouth, by letter and through the press.  For this
purpose we also made us of various lithographed circulars, which we
dispatched to our friends and correspondents throughout the world on
particular occasions, when it was a question of the internal affairs of the
Communist Party in process of formation."

Traditionally in the SWP of old, we were basically taught to ignore Marx and
Engels almost completely, and especially on something like organizational
questions, that aspect of Marxism hadn't been elaborated by Marx and Engels
but by Lenin. And I remember reading "What is to be done" and other stuff by
Lenin from the early 1900s and being sort of confused, because what I was
expecting to find was a sketch of this new type of party he had dreamed up,
but it wasn't there, not that I could understand.

I was quite surprised to discover when the comrades assigned me to the SWP's
"leadership" school that the Communist League had been what we would have
called a Leninist-type party, and that the MAIN thing Marx and Engels did
with it after getting it into shape was to dissolve it -- twice.

José



----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxism list" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: The speech that Barnes should have given


> Some thoughts (rough notes) prompted by Louis Proyect's posting: "The
speech
> that Barnes should have given":